“Upstream” Battle: How a Filmmaker Makes an Incredibly Weird Film in 2013

A few days after seeing Shane Carruth’s new film Upstream Color, it still seems hard to know where to begin.  Carruth was the come-from-nowhere savant, trained as an engineer, who made Primer, perhaps the most realistic and compelling movie about time travel ever imagined, filmed in the suburbs of Dallas on a vanishingly small budget ($7,000). That was 2004.  The densely plotted and lapidary filmic wizardry of Primer suggested an indie filmmaker of great ambition, one who could follow in the steps of Christopher Nolan and Memento and jump from high-concept underground films to “conglomerate-backed mall-magnets, another Bryan Singer or Darren Aronofsky,” as Wired recently put …

Steubenville and the Rejection of Sexual Danger?

Steubenville. It’s gained one-word notoriety. A town of less than 20,000 people in eastern Ohio, Steubenville was little-known until a story ripped straight from an episode of Friday Night Lights got splashed across the headlines and made the place infamous. A small town ruled by football, a countdown clock until the next game, and blatantly hagiographic reverence for its players and coaches. A wild end-of-summer party with a lot of booze, hookups and smack-talk. Only this time, there’s no Coach’s wife - the inimitable Tami Taylor - to kick some ass. In fact, it seems no one would help a sixteen-year old drunk, unresponsive girl from being stripped of her clothes, viciously …

No Oscars but Plenty of Action: Subverting Traditional Masculinity in Die Hard and Point Break

In a recent podcast of Slate’s Culture Gabfest, moderator Stephen Metcalf, movie critic Dana Stevens, and Deputy Editor Julia Turner discussed the inaugural issue of Kindling Quarterly, a new print publication aimed ostensibly, despite the protestation of the publication’s founders, at “hipster dads.” Whatever one thinks of the quarterly’s premise, all agreed that ideas about masculinity were in flux. Metcalf described the current state of American masculinity as “troubled” or “ambivalent.”  The rise of creative types with flexible schedules who promise to be more present parental figures than their own fathers, Metcalf argued, was in many ways a new phenomenon, if not in …

The Contested Space of the Victorian Vagina: The Myth of Vibrators and Hysteria Therapy

Well, folks, when I’m not indulging my love of movies that involve Flo Rida medleys, I sometimes try to be professionally legit. Obviously, this involves watching more movies or trying to figure out how to not snicker like a thirteen-year old boy while explaining the historical origins and uses of the vibrator. Frankly, I wasn’t even aware vibrators had a (contested) history. But while preparing a lecture on female hysteria and its treatments for an undergraduate history class, I uncovered a heated debate amongst historians on the limits of writing histories of sexuality and the role of scholarly ethics when using historical evidence. I hadn’t heard of technology historian Rachel …

Making Modern San Francisco: Josh Sides’ Erotic City

Over the past twenty years, historians charting the shifting geographies of 20th century sexuality have made some of the field’s strongest contributions. George Chauncey’s landmark publication Gay New York (1995) pushed back against notions that pre-World War II homosexuals languished in isolation and obscurity, presenting a coded gay subculture that clearly occupied a place in the public sphere. More recent works by Nan Boyd (2005) and Daniel Hurewitz (2007) focused primarily on the first half of the twentieth century. Each employed approaches that placed homosexuality squarely in the public spheres of their respective cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In many ways, Josh …

Impending Hurricanes, Alternative Sexualities, and Tourism – Part I of the 2012 UHA Conference

Welcome to the 2012 Urban History Conference.  Hurricane Sandy loomed over the event like depression in a Tim Burton film, and ToM's editors and contributors send our best wishes to everyone on the Eastern seaboard. Much like our 2010 coverage, we did our best to cover an array of topics but inevitably the conference’s size and density placed limits on our correspondents. Nonetheless, ToM's endeavored to bring you several snapshots from the conference. Consider these imagistic academic instagrams rather than a comprehensive take on the event itself. Part I – Sex and the City   Panel - The Sexual City in the Americas: Tourism, Migration, and Race in Mexico City, Miami, and New …

Post-Modern Debate: The VP Clash in Poetic Form

[Editor's Note: Psyched about about Mittens and Barry this evening? As an homage to American political culture, Pavement, and poet John Ashbery, ToM's Clement Lime offers up his poetic take on the Biden-Ryan fracas.  Constructed from gchat conversations about the VP debate and in the style of Ashbery's legendary work The Tennis Court Oath, the poem will hopefully spark the inner politico in all of us.] What channel are you watching the debate on? CNN PBS CSPAN bitches, Biden leads with the grin! White, long haired, erotic. I speak for myselves, post-sober, or mice elves. I'm drunk on Paul Ryan workout photos! You all mind if I just listen to DJ Screw records all night …

The Sexuality of “Whimsy”: Gender and Sex in the Films of Wes Anderson

Writing about Wes Andersen’s latest production, Moonrise Kingdom, New York Times critic A.O. Scott summarized the symbolic consummation between the film’s adolescent protagonists Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward): "There, with a tent, a French pop song and unembarrassed honesty (Sam warns Suzy that he may wet the bed), they consummate, metaphorically, an enchanted, chaste affair capped with a hilariously symbolic deflowering."  While academics, critics, and others have long discussed dominant Anderson motifs such as loving but dysfunctional families, unreliable patriarchs, and the aesthetic particulars associated with the now-veteran director, far fewer have examined the …

“When She Talks, I Hear the Revolution”: Looking Back at the Riot Grrrl Revolt

Anyone whose has a cable subscription to IFC probably recognizes Carrie Brownstein from her comedic stylings on the channel’s popular show Portlandia.  Yet, fewer may know that Brownstein currently plays guitar for Wild Flag or along with Corin Tucker founded seminal Pac NW rock group Sleater Kinney.  Formed in 1994, Sleater Kinney (the band functioned as a three piece and had three different drummers over the course of its existence) has often been pegged as part of the Riot Grrrl Movement.  However, if one reads Sara Marcus’s engaging Girls to the Front:  The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, Sleater Kinney appears to be the belated second wave of the movement, a culmination …

L.A. Confidential: California History and the 2012 Whitsett Seminar

If you've ever been to Los Angeles, you know beneath the sprawl lay one of the nation's most fascinating cities.  From Echo Park to Boyle Heights to Silver Lake to Malibu, Los Angeles collects vistas, peoples, highways, and film noir like few others. Beyond LA, California provides scholars with ample subjects from which to explore history both locally and nationally.  The network of public universities in Los Angeles and the state's other cities only furthers this process. The annual Whitsett Grad Student Seminar enables future academics to present their California research to professors and  graduate students working in similar fields. Cal State Northridge's Whitsett Professor of …